salmon

Op-Ed: If feds want Potter Valley dams, they should buy them

PRESS DEMOCRAT EDITORIAL

President Donald Trump’s California derangement syndrome is back as his administration tries to prevent PG&E from removing aging dams in the Potter Valley Project.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has moved to intervene in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission process to determine whether PG&E may tear down two dams and a mothballed powerhouse. Rollins wants FERC to deny the application.

Agriculture secretaries often get involved in these sorts of proceedings. Major changes to watersheds can impact farmers, after all. What is unusual in this case is that in supporting irrigators, a supposedly pro-business administration undermines private enterprise.

PG&E wants to surrender its license for the hydropower system on the Eel River because it now costs more than it is worth. The dams and powerhouse are more than a century old and are nowhere close to meeting modern standards. They require costly repairs and upgrades to remain safe. PG&E absorbs those costs, and no doubt passes some onto ratepayers.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/12/28/pd-editorial-if-feds-want-potter-valley-dams-they-should-buy-them/

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Trump administration intervenes in dispute over future of Potter Valley Project

Phil Barber, PRESS DEMOCRAT

See also the article by the Lost Coast Outpost

Opponents of a plan to remove two Pacific Gas & Electric-owned dams from the Eel River in Lake and Mendocino counties have officially won a huge ally: the Trump administration.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Friday filed a notice to intervene in the utility giant’s bid to decommission its waterworks in the rural area, which also include a century-old power plant that helps to shunt Eel River water into irrigation canals that support Mendocino County’s Potter Valley and dump into the upper Russian River, boosting supplies for farms and hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers in the North Bay.

PG&E’s application to decommission the so-called Potter Valley Project is being considered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees licensing of the nation’s hydroelectric facilities.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/12/20/trump-administration-intervenes-in-dispute-over-future-of-pges-potter-valley-project/

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Op-Ed: Mismanagement pushes salmon toward extinction

Tom Philp, PRESS DEMOCRAT

For California water managers, the Sierra snowpack has always been like money in the bank. With steady kisses of spring sun, snowmelt reliably flows ever downward until reaching the state’s vast network of reservoirs downstream.

But in the spring of 2021, in what turned out to be the second year of a scorching three-year drought, something happened to a meager snowpack. Much of it unexpectedly vanished into the sky or ground. Summer, as it now tends to do, had arrived early.

Faced with a cruel choice of who gets the limited water and who goes without, human decisions designated the remnants of California’s once-massive salmon population as the losers. The operators of the state’s largest reservoir, behind Shasta Dam, had already begun to honor contracts that guarantee farmers a lot of water, come drought or deluge. That meant less water in the Sacramento River to keep its inhabitants alive.

When adult salmon returned from the Pacific Ocean that winter, they swam upstream to below the dam where they would traditionally spawn. But the low flow in the river was lethally hot. Nearly all the salmon eggs failed to produce offspring.

The tragic loss of these salmon is one of too many examples of how California keeps harming an iconic fish species it is supposed to protect. A drought is a setback for salmon in the best of times. Here is how the last one could not have been worse, thanks to human mistakes.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/11/10/philp-from-droughts-to-human-errors-california-salmon-near-extinction/

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Op-Ed: California is failing its signature salmon

Tom Philp, PRESS DEMOCRAT

“Basically, we sit on the edge of extinction,” said Jeffrey Mount, a longtime expert in California rivers who conducts research at the Public Policy Institute of California. There have been successes, most notably the removal of dams on the Klamath River. It is the primary wild population of the Sacramento River watershed with the dangerously dwindling numbers.

California salmon are as central to our historic identity as the symbol on our state flag, the California grizzly. It is a sad and ironic tragedy that the grizzly has been extinct for generations. What does it say about us if salmon may soon follow?

California is known around the globe for its commitment to environmentalism. But the state is struggling. Much is chronicled about how California isn’t on target to meet climate change goals, such as our pioneering plans for “net zero” emissions of global warming gases in just two decades. There is less attention on how the state is equally failing the signature inhabitants of its natural world.

Losing salmon would be an ecological disaster for our freshwater ecosystems, forests, riverbanks and other native species if their links to the salmon were severed. Healthy salmon runs mean jobs for Californians, but the industry generating $1 billion is at risk, as is a historic piece of California’s culture.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/10/12/philp-california-is-failing-its-signature-salmon/

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PG&E files application to decommission Potter Valley Project

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

The utility formally has filed its plans to shut down the two Northern California dams and century-old powerhouse that comprise the project.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has filed its formal plans with the federal government to decommission the Potter Valley Project, which includes two dams and a century-old powerhouse that together have helped connect the Eel and Russian River watersheds to provide water to cities and farms for generations.

The filing marks another step in the power company’s multiyear effort to divorce itself from the two-dam system — Scott and Cape Horn dams — that PG&E officials say has been operating at a deficit of $1 million a year.

“Today’s filing marks the next step of a thoughtful and transparent decommissioning journey for the Potter Valley Project — but it does not change our operational responsibilities or obligations,” Dave Gabbard, vice president of power generation for PG&E, said in a press release.

If approved by the feds — no such request has ever been denied — plans would kick into motion the next large dam removal project on the West Coast.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/potter-valley-pge-plans/

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A to-be-drained lake, a PG&E plan, and the promise and peril of California’s next big dam removal

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

LAKE PILLSBURY — A cool May breeze lapped across the surface of this reservoir in remote Lake County, where a couple made their way out in a boat across otherwise serene waters, taking advantage of the brightest bit of afternoon sun.

This man-made retreat, four square miles of water impounded by a dam across the upper Eel River, feels durable. It’s filled with hungry trout and black bullhead, prey for the sharp-eyed bald eagles, egrets and herons that hunt these waters.

To many of its visitors, and the several hundred people who live along its 31-mile shoreline deep within the sprawling Mendocino National Forest, Lake Pillsbury is the region’s heartbeat.

But Scott Dam, at the foot of Lake Pillsbury, and another, smaller dam on the river 12 miles downstream, have also become a headache for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which owns both dams.

And that’s creating a controversy that’s drawn interest from everyone from those who live on Lake Pillsbury, to North Bay communities whose water supplies are linked to both dams, to federal agencies now under control of President Donald Trump.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/potter-valley-dam-pge-mendocino/

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Op-Ed: A two-basin deal is the only solution

Joe Parker, PRESS DEMOCRAT

The Two-Basin Solution shares water resources and restores fisheries, benefiting the Eel and Russian rivers.

Our ancestors have hunted, gathered and fished in the upper Eel River watershed for millennia. They lived in harmony with the river and its surrounding ecosystem, intuitively understanding the intertwined nature of the cycles of the river and the cycles of life itself. Their knowledge of the river has been handed down over time, each successive generation adding to that knowledge and passing on to the next the sacred obligation to protect and preserve the river.

No other sovereign has this connection to the upper Eel watershed. This has been, and will always be, our river. We are the Round Valley Indian Tribes.

In the early 20th century, without our consent, the Potter Valley Project dammed our river and started diverting significant portions to generate electricity, after which the water was made available, at no cost, to users in the Russian River watershed. All the while, our community endured the loss of a critical part of our economy and culture: the decimated Eel River salmon fishery.

These impacts are not limited to a degraded fishery and economic hardship, but also significantly severed our spiritual and cultural connection to the river, leading to a diminished quality of life for members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, while Eel River water flowed free of charge to benefit Russian River users. Quite simply, the Potter Valley Project dams and the water supply they generated have benefited others while we have paid the costs. This can no longer stand.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/opinion/sonoma-county-lake-mendocino-russian-eel-river/

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